Ch. 2-43 Kalem Faces Nata

Chapter 2-43 “Kalem Faces Nata”

I’d call it peer pressure, but not one of these people is actually his peer. Don’t forget, he’s about the nearest thing to a prince in these lands. Not that anyone would know that except that merchant he’s traveling with. Kalem happens to be a pretty humble guy in some respects. *cough*girls*cough* That’s okay, he’s got a loyal companion and a crowd not giving him a choice. How about cheering him on at the Kinslayer facebook page!

* In sport or game fighting, it’s not about killing blows, it’s about making the strike. That being said, looks like that first kid is still really feeling it. Also, the butt of the weapon counts. Anyone who’s ever been hit with a hammer knows this. Notable fact: until relatively recently, almost all sports were either war or hunt related skill contests. The only exception I can think of is tlachtli which was used as a proxy in place of actually going to war. The Western version would be to just have champions fight it out so your entire army didn’t have to die. War tends to be costly for all sides.

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Try Achilles! Yes the use of deciding battles by champions predates historical records by a long shot. If one considers that tribal or clan conflicts were settled among very small populations where the loss of every single hand meant a serious loss of manpower at harvest, and that there is a very strong taboo internal taboo against taking another human life ( instinctual, not cultural), then those rare individuals who were born without normal emotional or moral compasses became strategic assets. These people could take a human life without flinching or suffering from it, and thus were used as champions. Once organized and disciplined mass armies were developed and military art and science took over, these people were not strictly necessary. Currently we call them sociopaths and they are commonly found in politics, used car sales and prisons.

@Hanna The charge that hierarchies of corporations are lead by more sociopaths (a category now folded into Psychopathy) was initiated by one Professor Adorno, of Italy, in the early 1950s. Practically all the later work through the 1980s (when I stopped be interested) that came to the same conclusion referenced his work as a data source, without mentioning his affiliation. You see, Dr. Adorno had needed to resign from a Board of Directors himself, 2 years before he published his study, presumably to give it more credibility. What Board of Directors was that? It was the Board of Directors of the Italian Communist Party. In those days *all* such shifts were approved by the NKVD in Moscow, so we know where his orders came from, both for the study, and the resignation to make his links less obvious.

Agency cost in *any* hierarchy tends to exponentiate as you near the top of it, because there are fewer constraints on the people nearer the top of the hierarchy. The highest and steepest hierarchies tend to have the worst agency costs. Fortunately, corporate hierarchs are further constrained by market shifts when corporate performance suffers. Unfortunately, this type of constraint is something that political hierarchs have found more ways to insulate themselves from.

We have to be very careful about the sourcing of studies about groups that academia still finds so fulfilling as targets, even though “the socialist camp” is now a ghost of its former self.

It’s an interesting method to discredit someone’s claim by stating that it originated from a communist and is therefore invalid or questionable. One might note that a person’s party affiliation and political beliefs do not alter the affects of a study or its data, though I guess it could affect how the data is interpreted. You further claim that the studies you’ve read note it as a data source, though it can’t have been the sole data source, which further undermines you claim. Meanwhile, you ignore the many studies since then that further define and clarify sociopathy and psychopathy and still more that show how psychopaths often gravitate and even do very well in positions of power as they often require those very traits. Indeed, one should be careful in sourcing their information. *hint hint*

Now let us not argue politics. It makes for very poor taste on a comics site.